For those who work for a living, the level of inequality
in the U.S. – writes Piketty – is “… probably higher than in any other
society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world …”

In other words, there might have been some squalid country in the distant past where the disparity between people without any job and the king was higher than between a jobless American and the top fatcat in the U.S.
But the spread between the minimum wage American worker and the American oligarch is the greatest in world history.
Indeed, inequality in America has become so extreme that the “99%
versus the 1%” meme is grossly inaccurate … because it’s really the .01% versus the 99.99%.
Paul Krugman notes:

A lot of what we know about inequality actually comes
from [Piketty], because he’s been an invisible presence behind a lot. So
when you talk about the 1 percent, you’re actually to a larger extent
reflecting his prior work. But what he’s really done now is he said, “Even those of you who talk about the 1 percent, you don’t really get what’s going on. You’re living in the past. You’re living in the ’80s. You think that Gordon Gekko is the future.”
And Gordon Gekko is a bad guy, he’s a predator. But he’s a self-made
predator. And right now, what we’re really talking about is we’re
talking about Gordon Gekko’s son or daughter. We’re talking about
inherited wealth playing an ever-growing role. So he’s telling us that
we are on the road not just to a highly unequal society, but to a
society of an oligarchy. A society of inherited wealth, “patrimonial
capitalism.”
***
So we are going probably, unless something gets better, we’re
going to look back nostalgically on the early 21st century when you
could still at least have the pretense that the wealthy actually earned
their wealth. And, you know, by the year 2030, it’ll all be inherited.

In other words, we’re going from oligarchy to dynastic royalty.
Nobel prize winning economist Robert Shiller and Former Goldman Sachs managing director Nomi Prins also say that inequality may get much worse than it is now.
Postscript: Mainstream economists like Krugman – who long discounted
the importance of inequality – now finally admit that runaway inequality
destroys the economy.
Unfortunately (and ironically), the policies which they push are the very thing causing extreme inequality in the first place.